This isn’t discussed much here on the forums, because of our focus on gaming up girls with cold approaches, but it’s huge and should be focused on. Learning pick-up is awesome because it trains you to put yourself through intense self-development and you really improve your overall confidence in the process, but way too often guys in this community will just go out every single night and have no friends outside of dudes that they’ve met on this online community. Building up your social circle is important because it’s pretty much your lifestyle – it’s who you are and what you do 24/7, developing it alongside your game just turbocharges your self-identity that much faster.

Social circle game is a bit slower and more subtle than pick-up and cold-approaching, but it’s also complementary. If you’re already pulling regularly you should have no problem building social circle quickly in any new city that you move into – the same exact skills will help you from the start. And on the other hand, if you’re not confident meeting new people and approaching women – just baseline game – then you should work on that first – one of the reasons some guys in this community are anti-social circle is because they came from the lowest rung of their group of friends, a place of low confidence, and now they’re focused on improving themselves socially and getting themselves back up. But if you’ve been practicing pick-up for a while now, you need to start committing some time to penetrate some social circles that you’re interested in….

1. Build social capital and acclimate yourself to the scene

“Social capital” – it’s like currency, but for socializing, it’s anything that displays value indirectly without you really doing anything, it expresses your lifestyle to those around you. Examples include: your close group of friends, having lots of cute female friends, cool pictures on your Facebook/MySpace profile of you partying and hanging out, living in a cool area where there’s a lot going on, knowing people in the nightlife scene (promoters, club owners, etc.), travel stories, having a blog, having lots of pictures on your digital camera, knowing what’s happening in your city – cool parties and events, etc. You should always be building your social capital, and it’s really easy to do with pick-up. It’s part of your overall image and it adds massive value automatically. Tailor it to whatever scene you’re getting into.

2. Think of everyone you meet as a connector to meeting even more people

This is very basic and simple, but powerful – it’s what good salesmen and businessmen do, you never know who that person knows. Expand your social circle exponentially – get to meet two or three more people out of every one person that you just met. Decent-looking girls who are cool to hang out with usually have a few hot friends. This is why learning how to cold approach is awesome – because you could expand your social circle that much quicker.

3. Add value to everyone you meet – give them a good time and help them out

This is obvious, but what’s key is that you do this to maintain those relationships. It’s easy to just meet a ton of people, hang out with all of them and make friends with their friends, but that still doesn’t add to your circle unless you maintain them. You do that by inviting them to parties, giving them a good time whenever they’re around you, connecting them to other people that they’d be interested in meeting, and overall taking care of them – this is all done in a friendly “I’m the host” mentality. If you help people and take care of them, you’ll eventually get dividends from them – they’ll intro you to their hot friends, valuable business contacts, etc.

4. Be the connector, “the party guy” – the center of attention

In every social circle, there’s one guy who knows where all the parties are, what the plans are going to be this weekend, and who gets called from every girl about places to check out. You need to be that guy. That same guy is continually linking his friends with his other friends and then those friends with even more friends – he’s automatically social proofing himself with tons of people around him. He’s the connector.

If you’re throwing a party or organizing an event or any small hangout, don’t ever just invite one small group of friends – or just one group of girls. Invite multiple groups of people, hype them up to each other, and connect them.

Continually build options for yourself and work the room by leveraging different groups.

I've been working with Real Social Dynamics since 2002. That's right, for SIX WHOLE YEARS, I've been running live, in-field Bootcamps in cities all over the world. The program has continually evolved since that time, eventually becoming the life-changing juggernaut that it is today, but a few things have remained the same.

For example, at the very beginning of the program, we do a little "meet and greet." I ask the guys where they're from, what they do for a living, and what their hobbies are.

You can tell a lot about a guy by the things that he chooses to do in his spare time. Generally, I've found that the guys who do the best on Bootcamp are the ones whose hobbies involve some form of physical activity. I'm not exactly sure why, it's just a conclusion that I've reached over the years through analysis of the empirical data at hand.

On the other hand, when I ask him what his hobbies are and the dude looks at me with a blank stare and says, "Nothing," then I know I'm probably gonna be in for a tough weekend.

Of course, it's never entirely wise to indulge in generalizations. Sometimes, the biggest pimps will have some pretty esoteric interests that don't necessarily lend themselves directly to pickup.

For example, I am pretty hardcore into gardening, of all things.

Yeah, gardening. I'm a freakin’ plant nerd. Wayyyy back in the day, I worked at a nursery for a period of several years. I initially took the job to get discounts on supplies, as at the time I was an avid cultivator of Manchurian Fern Tomatoes. During my tenure at the nursery however, I soaked up horticultural knowledge like a sponge. Everything from diseases, to landscape architecture, to soil amendment, you name it. I grew roses and entered them in shows. I installed lawns. I cloned specimens from cuttings. I advised homeowners on native plant installations, etcetera etcetera etcetera.

In any case, those days are long gone now, but I still have a little place in my heart for the botany. If you ever meet me in person, look closely at my thumb and you can still see the green. In fact, this summer, while back in town on hiatus from the Jeffy Freedom Tour, I decided to take back my yard from the wild. I'd neglected it for a couple years, and it was overrun with weeds and random debris.

So I went to the garden center, got some stuff, rolled up my sleeves and went for it. A couple months later, the space is totally transformed. It is similar to heaven.

So I was putting around out there today, doing a little pruning, a little weeding, and I got to thinking about the parallels between pickup and gardening.

Yeah, on the surface it sounds a little ridiculous, but understand you're talking to a guy who eats, breathes and sleeps pickup 24/7 so it shouldn't really be that surprising. So. What are the lessons we can learn here?

First off, gardening is great because it connects you with that primal masculine core.

"What?" you might be asking, "how does dicking around with flowers do that?"

Let me assure you, when I was digging that tree stump out of the yard with a pick-axe and a hatchet, I was a goddamn Neanderthal. Hacking and sweating for an hour and a half, covered in dirt, I finally ripped the damn thing up out the ground with my bare hands, threw it across the yard, thrust my arms over my head and bellowed a primal scream that I'm sure had my neighbors thinking I was deranged.

Thing is, THAT is the same way that I feel when I'm lording it up in the field. It's the exact same impulse... that impulse to dominate, to crush the opposition and come out on top, to OVERCOME. To let loose all Hell like good ole Maximus in "Gladiator." When you are in the club,THAT is the juice you want to tap into. Tim calls it THE FURY.

You step up to that tree stump, i.e. that mixed group with the turbo in it, whatever, and you get your hands dirty. When you connect with that masculine core, questions like, "What do I say?" become laughable, a joke. It does not matter, because you KNOW that you're going to step to her and OWN, and you are going to PULL. You get in the ring and you BANG until the fight is over. Come hell or high water, you are going to get a RESULT.

Moving on.

One thing about maintaining the garden: I have to be out there every couple of days to assess the whole scenario. I go out there, snip some dead stuff off, give it some water, and ruthlessly yank out any weeds that have started to sprout up. As I'm slowly combing through the beds, pulling the weeds out one by one, I become completely immersed in the activity. There's a real meditative aspect to it. I'm focused on the task at hand as opposed to the eventual outcome. There is an overarching plan for how I want the thing to turn out, but that's merely providing the framework.

When I was out there earlier today, I realized how true this is for your game as well. If you want to cultivate a really slick game, you need to be out there a lot. That means going out with regularity and talking to girls, plain and simple. You cannot hope to get there by merely playing around with it when the fancy happens to strike. If I neglect it for a few weeks, I go out to the yard and all of a sudden, the weeds have choked out my digitalis. If I hide in my home and play World of Warcraft without human contact for a few months, then hit up the club, my game is going to be filled with all kinds of weeds as well. I'm gonna be rollin some kind of weird Howard Hughes type game. "You will hand me the milk with your left hand, only touching the bag." No, it must be a consistent and concerted effort.

With consistency, you are going to succeed, provided you are intelligent about your growth and are willing to put yourself under the microscope, weeding out disempowering behaviors and planting the seeds of new, empowering ones. This is a constant battle, one that never ends (until you're six feet under, that is).

If you haven't read the book "Mastery" by George Leonard yet, you need to do so IMMEDIATELY. It's a concise book that packs a lot of value. In it, Leonard outlines the path to true mastery of a skill, as opposed to mere "dabbling" or "hacking."

Reading it, the biggest principle that stuck out to me was the idea that masters practice solely for the sake of practicing. They take massive enjoyment in the actual *development* of the skill. The results, the accolades, the wins, these are all mere side-effects. They are a bonus, icing on the cake.

My friend Owl once told me about a jiu-jitsu instructor he had in Hawaii. This guy was crazy, he'd fight people on the street while he had two broken hands, etc. One day at practice, this guy is grinding my friend's face into the floor and nearly breaking his arm off, and suddenly he screams, "YOU LIKE THIS!! THIS IS WHY YOU COME HERE! YOU LIKE THIS!"

At that moment, at strange and disturbing as it may have sounded, my friend realized the guy was right. You see, Owl's not a guy who "sweats the process" as they say. He truly loves the process of learning itself: going in to the gym day after day, punching and kicking his way through the drills, sweating like hell. Consequently he has developed into a very skilled fighter.

So. From choding about with plants, we can observe some fundamental yet powerful lessons about our game:

1. Connect with the FURY and don't be afraid to get your hands dirty. Bring the full force of your masculine core energy to bear on your interactions.

2. Your practice needs to be consistent. Examine yourself, and pluck those weeds out of your game on a daily basis, preferably while they are SMALL little sproutlets. Cause once they get big, it's a huge pain in the ass to pull them out.

3. Learn to enjoy the process itself, viewing it as an almost meditative exercise. Lose yourself in it. Eckhart Tolle, the author of "A New Earth" and "The Power of Now," outlines this process in three steps: Acceptance, Enjoyment, and Enthusiasm. Let yourself experience all three modalities while in the club, and watch the magic happen.

With that, allow me to clean up my tools, sweep up the dirt, roll up my giant hose, and bid you farewell... until next time.

The other day I was doing one of my classic drills on BC where zero self talk is required and I happened to be doing it with yet another brilliant guy. For some reason he was incapable of doing it. We went back and forth but he couldn’t... I kept at it, encouraging, pushing, trying to relax him and he started doing it right towards the end. He seemed to shut the self talk off for a while.

Self talk
You will find yourself at your peak when you are able to shut the mental chatter off. Smart people have trouble with that. They are in the habit of intellectualizing everything. They seem to weigh the pros and cons of every decision before they do something. This, no doubt, is a killer of game. It will make you hesitant.

The best players have a quality of zero self talk that makes them extremely effective in the field. In the field, little or no self talk is required. Self talk is actually bad for you. You will notice you climb huge positive peaks when your self talk is at the lowest.

It is literally impossible to feel good and be happy and have any kind of self talk. Self talk tends to be reduced as we focus and get in a flow. Actually the word “flow” is very much related to not having any mental cobwebs. Just “flowing” like a river would.

Analysis and stalling, another name for AA?

It is when you can’t make any forward progress because you bog yourself down in useless details, pondering, weighing the odds...as opposed to getting on with it. Sound familiar?

While it is perfectly natural to want to spend time pondering about a plan, especially one with elements of risk involved, there comes a point where any more thinking goes against its accomplishment and you need to start making some real progress.

Planning is good. Failure to plan is planning to fail. But too much can be as destructive as not enough.
It is pretty common in this community to have a guy reading material for a year and a half or sometimes 3 or 4 years without doing a single approach. The guy knows everything there is to know about pick up but fails to execute in the field. In his mind he has to be ready first. By ready he means, I got to have all the angles covered, all the openers, all the possible situations as he devours pages and pages of pick up related stuff. He plays the game in his mind over and over.

Then he comes to BC and it is a shocker that he doesn’t need 90 percent of all that knowledge to approach a girl. The game is simple.

Procrastination
I remember in executive training in my old job, there was this pamphlet being passed around about Collin Powell, the guy in charge of the US Military campaign in the Middle East,’s management style in which he claimed he would make decisions with as little as 40 percent of the information. Most managers in my old company frowned at that. Needless to say my old company was known for long 4 hour meetings that would yield no clear decisions. They couldn’t understand that more information doesn’t necessarily equal better decisions.

Some good pointers to break procrastination are the following:
1. Agree on a point in time to get something done...and get it done or die trying. Don’t allow yourself to float into the nothingness of no dates.

2. Get reckless. Yes, act like a lunatic for a while. Go kamikaze for a while. If you are the typical procrastinator, this will show you the power of actions over ideas.

3. Make up your damn mind! Yes, shit or get out of the pot. Start small: what cloth to wear tonight for the club?

4. Gain momentum....does 3 or 4 approaches on your way to the club. Don’t wait for the situation to be perfect.

Excuses

I like this list of excuses I found on a web page. These are real excuses parents gave for their children not to go to school. Some have gross spelling mistakes in them. Enjoy.

“Please excuse Lisa for being absent. She was sick and I had her
shot”.

“Please excuse Roland from P.E. for a few days. Yesterday he
fell out of a tree and misplaced his hip”

“John has been absent because he had two teeth taken out of his face”

“Carlos was absent yesterday because he was playing football.
He was hurt in the growing part”

Smart people, because they are brilliant, can produce extremely compelling arguments NOT to do something. They are hand downs the best excusers in the world-from “I am not good looking enough” to “she is not hot enough for me”... If you let them, they can argue their way into sitting by the bar and getting drunk without approaching a single girl in the whole night. They love to give arguments, pros and cons of such and such method of pickup, etc.

Bad for pickup.

That’s why most of the best guys that I know are either dumb or have a knack of minimizing self talk or reducing it to zero as soon as they get into a club. That’s the quality that I am after when I teach bcs. All my drills, tactics and strategies to teach aim at eliminating self talk.

You could say “what about positive self talk?” Very clever. Smart point I tell you. You will notice when you are in the “flow”, that self talk is all gone. You seem to be in the present moment, not in the past, not in the future. And yes, you will be positive without trying.

I’ve dated a lot of girls that I’ve met from cold approaches, but I’ve also dated a lot of girls that I’ve met by using my skills at doing cold walkups to random girls to build a social circle of amazing girls, all of who have introduced me to their attractive girlfriends. The way I view a social circle is that a social circle is like having a boat with a giant net to catch fish instead of pickup, which is more similar to going fishing for 1 fish at a time.

Growing up in grade school, my social circle was relatively small, and it consistently mostly of people from my school and sports. However, outside of sports and school, I’d rarely hangout with these people. Thus, while attending the University of Wisconsin – Madison, I was determined to have an awesome social circle from the get-go. So I started throwing amazing parties, hung out every day with new friends and girls from the dorms, and I valued my relationships with my friends above and beyond anything else.

I found that by developing a fun social circle, I’d always have lots of interesting women around me and gave me plenty of opportunities to meet new girls. Developing a social circle became a passion of mine, but it got replaced by my newfound addiction to picking up girls.

For the first couple years of living in Los Angeles, my entire social circle revolved around Real Social Dynamics; however, I decided to make a change when I joined the young Hollywood socialite party organization, Xenii. Every Friday, we’d have all-night parties at movies studios, and, every Sunday, we’d have all-day parties by the poolside of mansions of other members in the club. Some of the sexiest girls in LA were at these parties.

My favorite Xenii summer poolside party at the mansion of the CEO of Bear Stearns.

When I started going to events, I didn’t know anyone and I was going solo, but there were regular poker events at the parties and I’d sit down to play poker and network with the guys there. My poker skills were pretty good because I used to spent hours playing poker on the internet while listening to CDs about how to pickup girls. And I always enjoyed meeting new people.

All of the guys who were members had similar interests so I found myself hanging out with a bunch of them to go to bars, make them my wingmen on trips (ie Mardi Gras in New Orleans), and to hangout at restaurants or house parties. Although my friends never studied how to pickup girls, they would walkup with me to meet girls and I’d carry the set. On the other hand, some of them were total closers with the ladies and would frequently hookup with new girls.

When I was not at the poker table, or hanging out with the other members, I was constantly doing cold approaches of girls and gaming them up and exchanging contact information. Soon, the girls and guys that I met would introduce me to their friends, and this adding perpetual motion to allow me to grow my social circle.

Sometimes, I would a female friend that I didn’t have an interest in hooking up with, so I’d do a double date with her with a cool guy friend of mine, and she would hook me up with a hot female friend as well. When I introduced the girls to really cool guys, they’d appreciate that and help me hookup with their girlfriends. And they would hookup me up with high quality girls because I introduced them to high quality guys.

I started doing this so often that I had one month where I literally had a date with a different girl every night of the week. Many of them were from cold approached myself as well as from introductions via my social circle. I’ve always been the kind of guy to field test everything to see how it would help me get hot girls.

Whenever I would go to the Xenii events, I’d text message all the other guy members that were my friends to make plans to meet up, and I’d also text message all the girls that I met at Xenii and outside of it to invite them to the events. The girls appreciated this because the events that I invited them to were absolutely amazing, and they would bring their friends along. What started off as a small handful of girls joining me eventually became several dozen girls rolling to the party with me every night. I became somewhat of a party promoter or a VIP Host.

In fact, I spent about 2-3 hours/week text messaging my social circle. Good thing I had the unlimited Verizon Wireless text message plan.

Every text message I sent out with hard sell whatever party or event that I would be involved with to make it sound like the coolest party, whether or not it was the best party or not because I knew it would become the hot party when I contacted my list (and my list of girls and guys were loyal to me because I would always make sure my events were truly fantastic).

For example, when I would organize a dinner party one day, I sent out:

“I’m hosting a special event dinner party at Magic Castle tonight at I’d love for you to join me. There will be roaming magicians, great food and drinks, and a hot crowd in a trendy mansion full of secret passages.”

On the other hand, when I would travel to cities where I didn’t know many people, I’d do similar text messages by promoting whatever nightclub I was going to attend (even if there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary happening, but hype it up so that the girls and guys I met would join me:

“I’m posting a Red Carpet event tonight at Pascha so come join me. It’ll be the hottest thing in town.”

Sometimes, my friends would get a table so we’d have a private area for our invitees to party with us. Other times, we would just party away with the rest of the people we invited. Regardless, I had a great time, and so would the people that we invited.

Although not everyone would respond to my text message, a lot of them would RSVP or tell me they wouldn’t be able to make it, but that they appreciated the invitation. Either way, it kept my name fresh in their mind so they would reciprocate by inviting me out to other events as well. Whenever holidays came by, I’d wish everyone else the best via text message (ie Happy Valentine, Day. May all your deepest, wildest fantasies come true) via hundreds of texts.

Some girls didn’t respond to my text messages for a couple years, and would suddenly show up at my parties. I actually dated a girl who was in this situation. She was dating other people, but when she became single, she started going to my parties. Suddenly, we were hanging out on 1on1s outside of my regular parties and hooking up. This is why I never get rid of a girl’s phone number even if she isn’t responding to my texts at first.

And I knew that whenever I went to a particular party, I could help make it truly outstanding by bringing a lot of hot girls. One night, the NBA basketball player, Stephen Marbury, had a party at his Starbury Mansion in the Hollywood Hills, and I texted 400 girls I met, but 50 of them showed up (which is above the average 10% response rate that I usually get, which I consider pretty awesome for such a large list). Thus, almost all of the girls at the party were invited to it by me. So I would get invited to more private parties because I became known as a guy who knew a lot of girls.

This reputation would increase in status as my list of girls that I contacted on a weekly basis (or more often) grew from a few hundred to a few thousand. All of these girls I had personally met in real life via my social circle or via cold approaches. Some of my friends use Facebook and MySpace to contact thousands of girls they don’t know to invite them to parties. Others use email newsletters, but I’ve always wanted a more personal touch.

A lot of my friends became super promoters and popular socialites in Hollywood. Many of them modeled what I was doing and I was modeling the innovations that they were doing as well. I sometimes enjoyed the social networking and politics of Young Hollywood more than picking up girls, and many of my friends were in the same boat. We just loved the process of meeting new people and the excitement of new events.

Today, several hot girls rely on me for their social life to tell them about the hot parties in town. In addition to rolling to Xenii with hot girls, I’d text message girls telling them just to go to various hot nightclubs in town with me and sell the club as the hottest party around at that particular night.

Hanging with Snoop Dogg with Girls at a Movie Studio Afterhours Party

Also, whenever I met another person I respected, like successful CEOs, peers from Real Social Dynamics, or celebrated entertainers (ie the lead singer of the rock band, Candlebox), I’d invite them to join me at the Xenii events. Soon, I’d also get invited to go on exotic vacations with other Xenii members and I would travel to Sundance Film Festival, ski trips on Big Bear Mountain, and to rent mansions with other members at the concert festival, Coachella.

I really liked doing these travel adventures with my friends and social circle because it added the diversity of doing things outside of parties. One of the things I liked about Xenii was that every party was at a different venue, and they also hosted non-party activities, such as dinners, wine-tasting, cocktails at private residences, international VIP special event invitations, and they hosted a social networking site for us to organize our own events.

Thus, I started invited others to regular dinner parties and events myself in small groups. I enjoyed doing this very much, and it reminded me of a smaller-scale version of what I did at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but with only a selective high caliber group of people.

To manage my social life, I built multiple lists of contacts to organize the various people in my phone. I’d store people in my phones under categories: hot girls, bottle service guys, friends, hot dates. After getting a 1000 people in my phone, I moved my contacts to Excel and also organized them by city because I was doing a lot of traveling. Soon, I had a couple thousand people in my phone and started using more rigorous software. I spent hours working my lists.

Girls who were on my party list would be moved to my “hot date” list if I started inviting them out for dinner or drinks outside of parties. If it didn’t work out, I’d move them back to the “party girl” list. Many girls would go back and forth my different lists. And I’d invite girls from one list to particular events and girls from other lists to other events.

I’ve now pride my skills in building a social circle as one of my strongest skillsets. I travel so often that I’ve learned how to land in a city and build an instant social circle. Sometimes, I’ll use social networking sites, like aSmallWorld (a private invitation only social networking site). I would post about how I’m traveling to a city and meet up with whoever was interested in hanging out.

Other times, I’ll just go out to the bars or other public places and start socializing with people. I’d do this both solo and with friends depending on whether I was traveling with companions or not. Either way, I have a very easy to model system on how to build a social circle and I am not confident that whenever I live in a new city for an extended period of time, I can quickly and easily create a group of friends and meet a lot of girls through it.

Whether I am inviting people to an elite party at the Playboy Mansion, inviting people to a dinner party, or casually meeting people for a beer at a local bar, I find that by having my head on building a social circle, my overall social skills with picking up girls and all other aspects of my personal development have improved as well.

It may be constant work, it is also a lot of fun, and similar to how I am a business man who has regular operations to manage, I’ve found that by running my social life like a business, it is very profitable.